Читать книгу Chasing Water - Anthony Ervin - Страница 11

3.

The Iron Fence

Man does not control his own fate. The women in his life do that for him.

—Groucho Marx

And if you wanna find hell with me

I can show you what it’s like.

—Danzig, “Mother”

Anthony Lee Ervin’s first sprint was out of the womb. The orderlies at California’s Northridge Hospital didn’t even have time to wheel his mother, Sherry, into the delivery room. They were running her down the corridor, urging her to hold on and paging the midwife, when he slid out onto the gurney. The only thing the doctor delivered was the afterbirth. Within fifteen minutes Sherry was up on her feet again. “The easiest part about me and Anthony was his birth,” she says. “After that it all went downhill.”

For the first six or so weeks of his life, Anthony had gastroesophageal reflux, a condition where the valve connecting the esophagus to the stomach opens at the wrong times, causing regurgitation. Sherry had to hold him at an angle and feed him slowly so the milk would stay down. Breastfeeding sessions could take two hours. Even after the nursing, Anthony was a slow, fussy eater. Sherry sometimes prechewed the food because he found it more palatable. He rarely ate meat, although his mother once walked in on him sitting on the kitchen floor, surrounded by grizzle and smeared in what looked like Crisco: he had eaten half a package of raw bacon.

Graduating from diaper to toilet was initially a source of anxiety for Anthony. The prospect of discharging directly into the toilet bowl terrified him, possibly out of a fear that he was losing part of himself. He’d stand in the corner of the bathroom, arms tightly crossed, refusing to participate in this monstrous violation of his anatomical integrity. Sherry found creative ways around such biological and existential obstacles. To first get him to pee standing up, she poured glitter into the toilet water and told him to shoot for the stars.

He was restless from infancy. Sherry doesn’t even remember him crawling. Athletic and wiry, he went “straight from the crib to running.” Even the crib phase was brief: he soon began clambering out of it. She once found him standing on the rails, his back against the wall and arms outspread. That night his mother transferred him from the crib to a bed, but he wouldn’t stay put. He was back on his feet every time she left the room: “I must have put him to bed forty times that first night.” This pattern would play out metaphorically for many more years: her trying to put him to bed, him trying to get out. Even when asleep, he wouldn’t stay in bed. An intrepid somnambulist, Anthony once sleepwalked right out of the house. His elder brother Jackie recalls waking to his mother’s cries that Anthony was gone. The front door was wide open. His parents found him around the corner, standing on the sidewalk, still fast asleep. After that Anthony’s father, Jack, installed a chain on the door.

For the first four years of Anthony’s life, the Ervins lived in a house with a pool in Canoga Park, an ethnically diverse, predominantly Latino neighborhood in the San Fernando Valley, north of Los Angeles. His mother occasionally took him into the pool with Jackie, who was six years older. But it wasn’t until Anthony was two, shortly after his brother Derek was born, that he had his first unmediated encounter with the water. It was an especially hot afternoon. Exhausted from nursing, his mother unintentionally dozed off on the living room couch with Derek, who was also asleep in her arms. Outside, beyond the glass patio doors, the pool sparkled, the sun flashing and vanishing on the surface like flaring matches. Moments after she fell asleep, Anthony awoke from a nap in his bedroom.

Wakie wake. Stretch ssttrreettcchh

Uppie.

Up.

Up.

Carpet sssssssoft. Door. Turn. Push.

Walk walk walk.

Momma and Deerek on couch.

Sleepytime for Momma and Deerek.

Walk walk walk.

Glass. Closed. CLOSED.

Push glass. Push. Puuuuuuush.

Ope-ope-opening door. Oooooopen.

O P E N

Hot. Feet hothothot.

Walkwalkwalkwalkwalk.

Pool Sun Sparkly

po

ol

st

ai

rs

Step.

Stop.

feet wet

Step.

Stop.

knees wet

Sit.

Pool Cool. Pooool. Cooool.

Foot splishie foot splashie.

Tick-tock, Tick-tock, I’m a little cuckoo clock.

Like Jackie swimming. Swimming like Jackie.

S h S h

p s p s

l i l a

r

a i

i n

n g

i’m swimming.

i’m Swimming.

Sherry awakened to find the glass patio door open. Little Anthony was sitting on the pool stairs, splashing his legs. She rushed outside, her stomach in knots. As she reached down to scoop him up, Anthony looked up and said, “Look at me, Momma. I’m swimming.”

Within a week, contractors were erecting a black wrought-iron fence around the pool. The imposing barrier, with its skyward spears tipped by black spades, transformed the pool into an object of fascination and fear for little Anthony. “Not necessarily my fear but others’ fear,” he recalls. “The pool came to represent freedom. A freedom that could lead to annihilation.” In retrospect the fence was as ironic as it was iron: by high school Anthony would feel fenced into a pool, not out of one.

* * *

Though Anthony actually wanted to join the swim team from the age of four or five, his parents insisted he wait because they felt he was too young. His older brother Jackie was on the team and Anthony would watch him compete at meets; it was only natural he’d want to follow in his wake. Jackie in turn assumed the role of protective big brother. Years later, when Anthony was on the swim team, an older kid once grabbed him by the ankles and tried to dunk him headfirst into the toilet bowl. Anthony fended off the submersion while dangling upside down by grabbing onto the bowl. When Jackie found out, he tracked down the kid and warned him that next time he’d answer to him; nothing like that ever happened again.

If Jackie was Anthony’s idol, his younger brother Derek was his doppelgänger. In photos you can barely distinguish between them, grinning side by side under similar shocks of chestnut locks. They were inseparable. When the Ervins later moved to Castaic in 1985, Sherry put a bunk bed in Anthony’s room because he and Derek wanted to sleep in the same room, often even in the same top bunk. Twice Derek fell out, once fracturing his arm.

While they still lived in Canoga Park, Anthony also spent time with a boy down the street with whom he’d sing and dance to Michael Jackson in his bedroom. It wasn’t his first time listening to the king of pop. Back when he was an infant, his brother Jackie, who was seven at the time, used to run through the neighborhood while pushing Anthony in a stroller and blasting the Thriller album at top volume from a portable Fisher-Price cassette deck. The combination of speed and music delighted Anthony: “I’d be blasting ‘Beat It’ and ‘Thriller’ and ‘Billie Jean,’” Jackie recalls, “and he’d be giggling in the front.”

One of Anthony’s most vivid memories is from when he was six or seven. One day he climbed up onto the kitchen counter to explore the top of the cupboards. While reaching up and groping blindly, he knocked down a thermometer, which shattered on the tiled countertop. At the time he had no idea what it was. He quickly lowered himself and began trying to scoop together the mercury beads that spilled over the tiles. Every time he attempted to collect them, the silver beads vanished mysteriously under his hands. “I tried to clean up the mess,” he recalls, “but the mess just got absorbed into me.”

Far less toxic was his earliest memory: his mother reading to him. The first book she read to him without pictures was Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. He was wowed by the grand adventure, by the renegade outlaw antics of Captain Nemo. These readings and his mother’s instruction in basic math put him ahead of the curve by the time he entered kindergarten. He was taller than the other kids, who didn’t know how to read and write like him. Easily bored, he grew disobedient, and his teachers would often send him to the counselor.

When Anthony turned seven his parents relented to his requests to join a swim team, hoping he’d channel his impulses and energies into the pool. He took to the water with relish and right away showed signs of being a natural. Initially he was most comfortable as a backstroker.⁵ In retrospect there was something allegorical about the way he’d wildly windmill his arms while staring into an uncooperative sky, often swerving and colliding into landlines. Unlike indoor swimmers, who can chart a straight path by the geometries of the ceiling, backstrokers in outdoor pools are either blinded by the sun or like sailors without navigation, forsaken and unaided under the blank canvas of a blue sky.

Backstroke would be Anthony’s primary stroke until high school. “There was something to not seeing where I was going, to just spinning my wheels,” he reflects. “I was good at that.” At his first competition that same year, he won his backstroke race despite being unable to maintain a straight course. He reveled in the flush of victory.

His speed caught the eye of the older age group coach and Anthony was transferred to the more advanced team. This was no longer swim school; he was now in the blood, toil, tears, and sweat domain of competitive training. Anthony rebelled against the demands for obedience. The coach, Dave, regularly singled him out, punishing him with push-ups, often in excess of fifty per practice. This disciplinary form of strength training served him well, and he continued to prevail over his opponents.

Calculating distances and time intervals in practice also honed Anthony’s aptitude for mathematics. He excelled in his subjects—scoring in the 99th percentile in math and reading on standardized tests throughout elementary school—but his behavior only worsened. He openly disobeyed his teachers, who started writing misconduct notes and calling his parents.

Though Castaic was no ghetto, it was also no gated community, and there was occasional spillover from the nearby prison. For a period, a flasher in a raincoat and pants with the crotch cut out started frequenting the neighborhood. Sherry used to let the boys walk alone to and from the bus stop but now began escorting them. One day when Anthony got in trouble in second grade, he decided not to return home, fearing the rebuke. When he didn’t disembark from the bus, his mother called the police.

I see a police car in the distance. Maybe Mom called the police because I didn’t go home. I turn and walk down the side street. The police car also turns down the street and starts driving toward me. Don’t run, I tell myself. But I start to run anyway. I may be able to run faster than my friends but not faster than a car. I hear the engine. A voice says, “Stop running,” but I don’t stop. And then louder I hear, “STOP,” and the car makes a loud sound like a giant chicken and the lights flash. And I stop.

The policeman isn’t mean but he has a gun and his uniform is scary. He asks what my name is and I don’t say anything and he asks again and I tell him, “Anthony,” and he asks for my last name and I say, “Ervin,” and he tells me that my mother is upset and frightened and it’s dangerous to be out by myself. Then he asks me why I didn’t go home on the bus. I don’t say anything because I’m not supposed to talk to strangers and I already told him my name. I don’t tell him that Miss S. called Mom because I was a disruption in class and that she moved my desk far away from the others. Like I have a disease or something. I don’t tell him that I don’t want to go home because I don’t want to be spanked. He asks me again. I just say, “Sorry.”

He tells me to get in the car. I tell him Mom told me not to talk to strangers or get into cars with them. He say he’s not a stranger, he’s a police officer. I know police aren’t the same as strangers but Mom always told me not to trust ANYBODY. So I just stand there. He shakes his head and says I should get in unless I want him to call more police. So I get in.

He doesn’t do anything bad to me. He’s not even mean. He just drives me home. Mom is going to yell and yell. And Dad will tell her to take it easy and let it go, but she’ll still use the wooden spoon or the belt or something. The worst part about getting spanked on your bum is you can’t see it coming. And then I’ll be grounded and stuck in my room for days and days without video games and I won’t be able to see my friends except at the pool, and even there Dave will shout and say, “Give me ten push-ups,” whenever I try to have fun. That’s why I don’t want to go home. But then I only get more punishment. And then I don’t want to go home even more.

Mom is standing outside on the road when we arrive. She looks mad.

Parents often fall into one of two camps: those who want to recreate their own childhood for their children and those who want to rectify it. Anthony’s mother is among the latter. She won’t talk about her childhood. Even her three sons know little about it. When I broached the matter, she retorted that she saw “no valid reason for opening that door.” Only later, after a few more attempts and after I added that it might give context to her protective mode of child-rearing, did she toss me a valuable scrap from her past: “The most I’ll tell you is I was on my own at a very young age. When you don’t have parents, you have to protect yourself. That’s hard work for a young person. So I was going to protect my children.”

The foster-care past she alludes to may explain why Sherry prickles at the mention of a more hands-off parenting approach. It’s hard to know if one’s survival odds are better getting between a grizzly and her cubs or between Sherry and hers. “I would kill to protect them,” she tells me matter-of-factly. Not the soft-spoken, mousy, blend-into-the-wallpaper type, Sherry runs her domestic affairs with the monomaniacal zeal of an Ahab, except her White Whale is a far more practical beast: order in the house and order in the family. Referring to herself as half-Jewish, half-Italian (she was called half-breed as a child), Sherry exudes a matriarchal charisma and maintains a maternal dictatorship, aligning in this sense more with her Mediterranean ancestry than her American upbringing. It’s from her that Anthony inherited his long limbs and cutting quips, which both mother and son can deliver with an infuriating and amusing nonchalance.

Though nearing seventy, she looks a decade younger and has the energy of someone half her age. The blood pressure and sleeping pills she takes are probably more due to hyperactivity and stress than ailing health, which she maintains with daily treadmill runs and neighborhood walks. One might be tempted to say that her intrinsic vigor and bullish tenacity played a role in helping her defeat cancer in 2000 despite the doctors giving her a 60 percent chance of dying within five years. Sherry considers it her duty to protect her children against the perils and treacheries of a poor, nasty, and brutish world. Whatever unspoken demons lie buried in her past, they inform her outlook: “I don’t let anyone walk on me. There was a time when I was more submissive, but not anymore. Shit on me once, shame on you. Shit on me twice, shame on me. I taught my kids that. Protect yourself.”

Though the family celebrates Christmas, not Hanukkah, and though there’s bacon in her fridge, Sherry feels connected to her Jewish heritage, especially to what she refers to as the Jewishness of valuing education. “I demanded good grades,” she tells me. Although the good marks came, they were often qualified by remarks about behavior misconduct, which never sat well with Sherry. As disciplinarian and keeper of order in the home (her husband was the good cop), Sherry had the most trouble with her middle son: “Anthony always had me frustrated. I never found my footing with what to do. I spanked, I yelled, I confined him to his room. Took away this, took away that. It was his personality. When I say, I want it now, I mean now. You say now to Anthony, and he says, I’m going to make you wait twenty minutes because you said ‘now.’ He stymied me all the time.”

The eldest sibling, Jackie, didn’t give his mother as much as grief as Anthony, but mostly because he was better at not getting caught. “There was crazy stuff that Mom had no idea about,” Jackie recounts. “Like riding bicycles over makeshift bridges across the roofs of houses, playing with nail guns on construction sites . . . I look back now and say, Thank God I lived.”

Anthony, on the other hand, didn’t try to hide anything: he’d openly flaunt his waywardness. Even so, the criteria for good behavior were stricter for the oldest brother. Whereas his younger siblings might be punished with a “time-out” that required them to stand in the corner, Jackie would be grounded for a month or longer for minor infractions like not doing homework, getting a bad grade, or lying. And though the others were also spanked, Jackie recalls receiving the lion’s share, usually delivered on his backside by spatula, spoon, shoe, or belt. Sometimes he was compliant, but other times he’d sprint away, running circuits around the house while “being chased and swung at.” Jackie admits he often exacerbated matters: “Part of me was just rebelling because I grew up in such a strict environment. You try to take the win from the loss. Lose on your own terms.”

It was a tug-of-war mother-son dynamic of bizarre, fiendish proportions: one evening Jackie took off sprinting on his usual circuit of the house with his mother chasing him, spoon in hand, only to encounter a wall where a door had been just that morning. “She sealed it up,” he says with a wry laugh. “And then I was trapped.” The purpose of the renovation was less diabolical: to raise the home value by forming an extra bedroom. But Jackie is convinced his mother instigated a skirmish that same day to lure him—or have him lure himself—into her dead-end snare.

In retrospect, Sherry has misgivings about the corporal punishment she doled out: “It was wrong, and now they’re always throwing up to me that I spanked with the wooden spoon.” But especially for Anthony, Sherry has always felt a guiding hand was essential, not only in elementary school but also throughout junior high, high school, and even beyond.

In contrast to Anthony’s mother, his father Jack took a more live-and-let-live, hands-off approach. Jack’s own father, a West Virginia coal miner, had been a tough man whose exchanges with his children included belts, stakes, and whatever else he could get his hands on. Jack didn’t want to raise his sons that way: “I’d had enough of that with my father. I’m not a yeller. I’m the level-headed guy, the peacekeeper.” Or as Sherry puts it, “Jack was always the diplomat, whereas I don’t give a shit.⁶” Having experienced plenty of hooliganism and police run-ins in his youth (he enlisted in the military as a way to keep out of trouble), Jack never felt Anthony was a problem child or troublemaker; he saw him rather as a “mischievous instigator” who merely required a calm talking-to now and then. Perhaps because the dominating presence of their mother eclipsed Jack’s more laid-back approach, the boys at times felt their father could be a detached, even absent figure. But they would also later come to realize that the trauma from his thirteen months in Vietnam had led to depression, anger, and anxiety that unraveled his first marriage and caused him difficulties within the family structure for years to come.

Whatever tunnels Jack had to work through, he seems to have emerged to a place of peace and acceptance. His Southern roots come through in his easygoing manner and lilting speech, whose musical cadence, deep timbre, and lullabyish geniality would, one assumes, be equally effective in coaxing both infants and women to bed. He’s a man of few but well-chosen words, delivering them in a way that makes even a mundane remark sound wise and meaningful. When I first visited the Ervin household, Jack motioned me into the kitchen, where he set before me a tumbler and a bottle of twelve-year-old Scotch that he saved for rare occasions. Then he motioned to the bottle. “Pour your own trouble, son.”

* * *

Before tribal societies went the way of the dodo, initiatory rites of passage under male guidance existed for young men as a ritualized way of severing their dependence on their mothers: the combination of, say, peyote and desert, was a method of forcing the teens to cope with physical and psychological hardship so that they might return to the tribe no longer as children but men. Such ventures into the wilderness would probably not jibe with Sherry’s pedagogical philosophy. She once told one of Anthony’s college girlfriends that she needed to be more involved in managing him because he required controls and parameters.

At one point during my visit, Sherry asked Anthony if he’d taken a nap. When he said it was none of her business, she retorted: “Always my business, because I’m your mother.” He was thirty-two at the time. Their exchanges often resemble those of a curmudgeonly couple, where each one anticipates the other’s responses and then mulishly digs in and refuses to budge, all the while maintaining the resigned calm that comes from the recognition that life cannot be otherwise. For example:

—Nap, Anthony. Listen to your mother.

—Don’t tell me what to do.

—I’ll always tell you what to do

—Don’t tell me what to do.

—I’ll always tell you what to do.

—Don’t tell me what to do.

For Sherry, the duties of motherhood are eternal, beyond the ken of time’s passage. When I asked if she felt that her Big Mother–style monitoring and the draconian reins she maintained over Anthony through his childhood and teen years were necessary, she scoffed: “For Anthony? Absolutely! Good grief, are you kidding? If he had parents that didn’t give a shit and fed him McDonald’s and KFC and left him on his own devices, he would have been the kid in jail. Absolutely.”

Sherry equates discipline with care: her involvement in her son’s life is not control but a fundamental and necessary expression of love, as essential as feeding him real food (she repeatedly points out that she never fed her sons fast food or pseudo-food like bologna). Cracking down on misbehavior is as much an expression of proper child-rearing as is preparing nutritious food. And a ferocious protectiveness accompanied that discipline. Woe befall those who criticize her sons. She refers to Anthony’s elementary school principal as a “hardnose” who presided under the delusion that Anthony was a juvenile delinquent. When his club coach at Canyons Aquatic Club prefaced Anthony’s “Swimmer of the Year” award at the banquet by saying that at best it should have been shared with another swimmer, Sherry bristled: “Jack had to hold me back in the chair. I thought I was going to run up on the stage and pop him one.” To this day, she hasn’t forgotten the two words at best: “I hold a grudge. I don’t forgive and I don’t forget.”

Yet Sherry’s brusque and guarded exterior belies a generous, doting, and self-sacrificing spirit. She’s always worked unceasingly in service of her children, at times holding multiple part-time jobs, while also cooking, cleaning, and ferrying her sons to and from swim practices. When turtles stray up to her house from the nearby pond, she picks them up and returns them to their watering hole. When her neighbors moved and abandoned their cat like undesirable furniture left curbside, she took the feline in. The pain of the disadvantaged and vulnerable distress and activate her at a primal level.

“I’m not very trusting from being burned too many times,” she once told me, and something in her tone made me realize that whatever her childhood details may be, my youth was a swaddled pampering in comparison. Her Cerberean posturings and iron grip over her sons, like that iron fence she once built around the pool, seem to stem more from her fear of being a neglectful parent than from the actual dangers of the world.

On my last visit, shortly before I left, Sherry leaned in toward me: “Not to threaten you, but if you harm my son through this book, either consciously or indirectly, I will hurt you.”(It wasn’t the first warning. On my previous visit, as I left, she said, “Be nice, or I’ll come after you. Even if I’m dead, I will hunt you down.”)

“Can I quote you on that?”

“Absolutely.”

She then invited me to join them for Thanksgiving and sent me off with a hug and a sandwich for the plane. When I later declined her invite, explaining by e-mail that my mother would have my head if I didn’t spend the holiday with my parents, she simply replied, “I approve.”

The others are so much bigger than me. This is Junior Olympics. Like Olympics for kids. Maybe one day I’ll go to the real Olympics.

I’m so nervous. If my time is in the top eight of all the backstrokers then I make finals. And then, no matter what, I get a medal. I’ve never won a medal before. But maybe not this year because I’m swimming now with the big kids, the nine- and ten-year-olds. I’m the only eight-year-old racing them.

It’s bright and loud with cheering. I’m nervous. I hear Mom yelling, “Go, Anthony!”

Phweeee: the whistle.

I jump into the water. I’m so nervous. I turn and face the wall and grab the handles.

Phweeee. “Take your marks.”

Don’t let the feet slip.

Beep! My feet stick to the wall and I shoot backward.

I kick hard and swing my arms as fast as I can. They made a new rule that you don’t have to touch the wall with your hand when you turn. Now you can roll to your stomach after the flags and then do a flip turn. It’s faster that way. But you have to time it right. I’ve practiced and practiced so that I don’t mess it up here.

I see other arms swinging behind me, so I’m somewhere near the front. But there are at least two others ahead of me. I need to be first or second in this heat to make the top eight. I can’t hear any cheering, only water splashing. There are no clouds today. I swim into the lane line a few times, but I don’t pull on it.

When I finish, two swimmers are already at the wall, so I won’t make the top eight. But then I find out that the top seed disqualified. He rolled over for his flip turn too early, right at the flags, and he missed the wall. This means I’m in eighth place overall, not ninth.

I’ve made finals!

And all because I practiced and practiced my flip turns. That’s why it’s important to learn everything, even the littlest thing, and practice until it’s perfect. You never know when that little thing will make all the difference.

Later in finals I get seventh place and it’s my best time. AND I get a medal. My first ever medal, not just another ribbon. Everyone is congratulating me. I am so happy. Mom says, “I am so proud of you, Anthony.” And Pops says, “Well done, son.” And Jackie and Derek look pleased too.

I won a medal against the big kids. I am so happy.

It was evident Anthony was going places with swimming, even if he couldn’t quite see where. At the age of nine he was selected to his first all-star team, the youngest member. On one away meet he shaved his entire body of its pale fuzz and rubbed baby oil all over himself, except on his hands and feet, which his coach warned him required friction. At the starting signal, he shot backward off the wall and like an oily mink raced to victory, defeating all the ten-year-olds in the Los Angeles region. The next year he set a Southern California age group record in both the 50- and 100-meter backstroke. After one record-breaking race, a few kids approached him for an autograph. This confused him and he turned to his mother for guidance. “I said, Sign it!” Sherry recalls. “He was embarrassed. He was so cute. He really was sweet.”

As the seasons passed, Anthony continued breaking California records. In junior high, he made new friends, many of which, as Anthony put it, “were just as good, if not better, at troublemaking.” As much as he loved the thrill of the race and the praise that followed, his resentment of the sport and its demands only grew. He regularly had to miss sleepovers, birthday parties, and, most devastatingly, a Megadeth and Iron Maiden concert. He pleaded to go to the show with his friends but wasn’t allowed because of a weekend swim meet, despite it being a minor one. Angry though he was, he had no choice but to put it behind him.

In junior high band, he came to idolize an eighth-grade bandmate who once tattooed himself with a safety pin during practice and told a wide-eyed Anthony that he “did the sister” of another bandmate. “He had long hair and a Danzig T-shirt with a chick in a skull helmet holding a bloody knife over a dead dude,” Anthony remembers. “And I was like, Wow, this is awesome! This is what music is all about!” The badboy unrestraint seemed far more enticing than the monotonies of swim training. When he turned eleven he faced a stronger, older pool of competitors. Though he no longer dominated, he nonetheless qualified for regional championships in Seattle. It was his first time flying across state boundaries for a swim meet. It was a high-tier competition but racing had become routine. Comfortable and confident, he also felt bored. So he decided to pass the time by playing with fire.

I’m not racing this morning so I get to stay at the hotel while the others are at the pool. Nothing to do in the room so I wander through the hallways. It’s boring though. Every hallway looks the same. Mundania. I pass a maid’s cart. She’s not there so I snatch a matchbook and run back to my room.

I sit on the bed and light a match with just one hand, using my thumb the way Tim showed me. That’s the cool way to do it. I watch it burn down. The edge of the flame is blue and the match glows red at the place where it burns. When the match goes out, a thin line of smoke shoots up. Like a soul shooting up from a fresh corpse. So cool. I light a match and then put the tip of another unlit one inside the flame. Sssshhphwweeee! Awesomeness. The flame is better when you combine two matches.

There’s a box of tissues by the bed. I hold one up and place a match under it and FWOOF, it bursts into flame and floats up like a spinning fireball! Dope! Not like paper, which burns slow and boring. With tissue it’s fast. The fire leaps to life when I feed it tissue. I can’t stop. I keep burning tissues. I’m like a magician but even cooler because I throw up fireballs from my palm instead of doves. Like I’m now in Xanth and this is my magical power. Burn, Mundania, burn.

One tissue lands on the bed and the sheet catches on fire. I put it out but not before it’s burned a hole into the bedsheet.

Back in Mundania. And in deep, deep shit.

The maid reported the damage, and Sherry soon learned that Anthony was being sent back on the next flight. She and Jack would have to foot the bill. When they met him, he was hiding behind the air hostess, who’d served as his steward in transit. Anthony, who’d been in tears on the flight back to LA, feared the physical punishment that awaited. But there was only disappointment from his mother. It was his first memory of shame. Her anger was instead directed toward the swim league for leaving Anthony unattended. (Due to her subsequent pressure, the rules were changed to mandate that swimmers had to be on deck for all races and could never be left unsupervised.) Around Thanksgiving he had to appear at a tribunal, where he was given community service and barred from all-star trips for a year.

There were other sources of tension at home. Jack had been working in production control for an aerospace firm but was laid off when the industry shrunk after Reagan left office. For supplemental income, Sherry returned to waitressing at an upscale restaurant. The swim club made an exception on their swim fees, offering them a reduced rate. Between chores, homework, swim practice, meets, and the frequent punishments, where he’d be sequestered to his room without video games, Anthony felt like he was missing out on life. He begged to quit swimming, but to no avail. Now that he was competing less and practicing halfheartedly, his performances suffered and he no longer dominated in his events. He harbored anger toward his parents—not just about the swimming, but also about what he saw as his mother’s disciplinary excess and his father’s lack of intervention. The decades since then have given him a new perspective: “As I’ve gotten older I feel like they were just trying to do what they thought was best. My mother tried to let us live the lives we wanted within reason. Yeah, we had to help out around the house, but somebody had to. She had enough responsibility. On the one hand was the iron fist and on the other was a boy who needed control and structure because he was wildfire.”

That winter, not yet a teenager, Anthony started running off for short periods, often absconding through his bedroom window. It was nothing dramatic—he usually went to his friend’s house or wandered through an undeveloped scrubland area nearby called “The Wash.” He sometimes found sanctuary in a treehouse that he and his friends had built. On the day before Christmas Eve one year, he took his winter jacket, a blanket, and a flashlight, and headed out. He didn’t return until the next day.

The sky looks like the lox we used to have for breakfast before Dad got laid off. Against it, the tree looks haunted. The birds are still chirping but not as much as before. I hurry and am soon climbing up the tree. One of the footholds is shaky. We have to fix that. I climb onto the platform. The scrap chain-link fence around the perimeter of the platform comforts me. I feel safer behind it.

I make a bed with the various blankets scattered around and lie on it with my back propped up against the fence. The rollout carpets provide some softness and warmth against the wood. I zip my jacket up all the way. Outside it’s silent and dark except for the hum of the highway. It’s ominous. I learned ominous from Man from Mundania. Or was it Heaven Cent?

I don’t have those two books anymore. Mom made me return them. That was bad. Anthony, where did you get these? And me not knowing what to say. Tell me, Anthony, where? And me telling her I stole them. And then all the yelling and screaming. I couldn’t take it. So to avoid Mom’s advance I ran outside to the backyard, circling the pool. And she was red and shaking. Jack, do something about this, would you? Just do something! But Dad had never gotten involved before that, so I didn’t expect him to actually reach for me as I circled by. He didn’t cuff me that hard but my nose opened up because I get nose bleeds so easily and blood sprayed all over my shirt and splattered and dripped all over the concrete patio. And I looked up at Dad with eyes as shocked as his as I cupped my hand under my nose, the blood blossoming and pooling in my palm. And Dad stood there stunned, his mouth hanging open, not knowing what to say. He had never once spanked me before that, and I knew by his eyes that this would be the last time. But even after that Mom still made me take the books back to the store. And my ears were so hot and I just wanted to run away. And the manager looked so serious while writing my name and address on a little card, saying if I ever did anything like that again she would report me to the police.

I tried to explain to Mom that I’d read all the other Xanth books so many times and none of the libraries had those two. And I couldn’t buy them because I didn’t even have pocket money anymore. I just wanted to read them. She said that was no excuse. And after that Mom even took away my books because that was the ultimate punishment. But that didn’t last long because she felt bad and she likes to see me read.

The stars come out. I try to imagine which ones exist and which don’t because some stars can be gone but you still see them because the speed of light is super slow compared to how far away they are. So some of the stars I see aren’t even there anymore. It’s like somebody filmed the sky thousands or millions of years ago and now I’m watching it. Like looking into a crystal ball except into the past, not the future.

I get nervous thinking about what will happen tomorrow so I take out my flashlight and The Source of Magic. I’ve read it before. But I know it will make me feel better. And it does. Because soon I’m no longer Anthony in Mundania. I’m Bink in Xanth.

I read half the book. It’s getting cold. I put the book down and throw the rest of the blankets over me and lie flat on my back. I stare up at the sky through the tree. The branches look scary without their leaves. Ominous. But at least there’s no yelling here. No arguments. No punishments. Just me and the tree and the stars. The stars from now and the stars from before.

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5. Michael Phelps also started swimming at age seven as a backstroker, although in his case it was because he was afraid to put his face in the water. Return to text

6. Sherry and Jack also diverge ideologically in other areas. To take one exchange:

Jack: Nothing wrong with having a relationship with that spiritual entity up there.

Sherry: There is no spiritual entity up there.

Jack: There is a universal knowledge out there you have to plug into time to time.

Sherry: I don’t believe in that nonsense. Return to text